


The Comforts of Inhuman Love

by Miss_M



Category: The Red Shoes (1948)
Genre: Artists, Ballet, F/M, Ficlet, Gen, Post-Canon, Regret, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Venezia | Venice, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2019-02-19 16:05:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13127094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: Lermontov had never known another dancer like Victoria Page.





	The Comforts of Inhuman Love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rosedamask](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosedamask/gifts).



> I own nothing.

He had never seen Vicky dance _Giselle_. 

He had toyed with the idea, but she had been dismissive of the ballet. Not for its artistic merits, which were incontestable, but for its libretto. 

_“An innocent girl falls in love with a man who lies to her and betrays her,” Vicky had protested while walking through Covent Garden, the staccato of her words matching the staccato of her heels on the cobblestones. “She dies of a broken heart, then sacrifices herself again in order to save him from a fate he richly deserves.”_

_“My dear,” Lermontov had replied, walking at her side, using his cane to gesture fishmongers and porters out of their way, “you are far too young, too beautiful, and too talented to be so cynical.”_

_“Cynicism is the armor of the young,” Vicky had parried._

_Lermontov had smiled. “And a prerogative of the old.”_

Like Giselle, Vicky had died young. And here he was, an old man sitting by an open window between velvet drapes, watching the lanterns on the gondolas reflected in the Canal Grande, shimmering like the corps in a ballet blanc floating across the stage. Like Willis.

Vicky had proven but the first to leave him. Ivan and Ratov were both gone. That lovely fool Irina had gone back to her husband less than a year after Vicky’s passing, her final words to Lermontov unpardonably cruel. 

Grischa had retired, which was a kind of death.

_“How can you leave this behind?” Lermontov had demanded, so agitated he had allowed himself to slam his palm on his desk. “Nothing matters but the art!”_

_Grischa had looked at him with a kindness tinged with pity. “Borya, ballet has left me behind, not the other way around. We have turned old, my friend.”_

_“Speak for yourself,” Lermontov had snapped._

Grischa had not held Lermontov’s damnable temper against him, and he was right: some members of Lermontov’s current corps knew the war against Hitler as only a story their parents told them, an inherited memory. The second and third things they thought of when they heard the word “Russia” were Tchaikovsky and the Iron Curtain.

Their first association with Russia remained, of course, he: Boris Sergeevich Lermontov. 

Boris Sergeevich Lermontov sat alone, with an empty brandy glass by his elbow, listening to the arrhythmic murmur of water and a gondoliere’s distant, off-key singing. He had used to regard his aloofness as a precious necessity, but now it felt threadbare and impossible to banish. 

Lermontov’s pride would not permit him the use of spectacles, yet his eyes were so bad, he could only see the lights on the canal as dancing smudges. This made it easier to imagine what he was seeing, should have been seeing. 

Despite how foolish she could be in life, how easily distracted, how fragile, Lermontov had never known another dancer like Victoria Page. She turned and turned, pirouette upon pirouette, disencumbered of flesh and bone, skimming along the canal, inhuman and perfect. Her hair still dazzled above her pristine white gown. No sweat, no labored breathing. Her arabesques and fouettés as precise as Lermontov remembered them. The slap and trickle of water turned rhythmic, the gondoliere’s caterwauling became crystalline and lilting: violins, oboes, flutes.

Lermontov closed his eyes, the better to see her ankles flashing as she drew nearer, the line of her arm and leg pure as though made of light itself. 

_“I_ am _that horror,” Vicky had told him that night at her aunt’s, and Lermontov had known it for wit yet truly believed she possessed the capacity to inspire terror. He had merely thought such emotions reserved for lesser men._

Vicky was still too far away, spinning across the canal, for Lermontov to see whether she was dancing the part of Giselle or Myrtha: whether she came to save him or condemn him. She was smiling, for the benefit of the world or for her audience of one. Lermontov approved: a true star smiled so that every member of the audience believed the smile was for him alone and left the theater a little in love. 

All those long years, he had laughed at himself, in the small, solitary hours of the night, for harboring this hope, but he had hoped nevertheless, and now his hope ( _his weakness_ ) threatened to consume him. Lermontov leaned on the windowsill, his heart beating painfully fast, and watched Vicky draw closer, to dance him away.


End file.
